Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Macmillan Powells The Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's death One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state. Cancer Ward, which has been compared to the masterpiece of another Nobel Prize winner, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. While the experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own—Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered—the patients, as a group, represent a remarkable cross section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes, both under normal circumstances and then reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness.

A seminal work from one of the most powerful voices in twentieth century literature, Cancer Ward offers an extraordinary portrait of life in the Soviet Union. CONNECT WITH Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Google Books Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 0 Reviews One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the 'cancerous' Soviet police state. Withdrawn from publication in Russia in 1964, it became, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that awoke the conscience of the world. As Robert Service wrote of its appeal in the Independent, 'In waging his struggle against Soviet communism, Solzhenitsyn the novelist preferred the rapier to the cudgel'. What people are saying - Write a review We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.

Selected pages View all » Common terms and phrases Afanas Ahmadjan already asked Asya Aviette began better can‘t cancer clinic couldn‘t course didn‘t didn’t doctor don‘t Dontsova door Dyoma everything exile eyes face Federau feel felt ﬁnally ﬁnd ﬁne ﬁngers ﬁnished ﬁrst ﬁve ﬂoor fungus Gangart girl give hadn‘t hadn’t hair hand happened he‘d he’d head I‘ve injections it‘s Kadmins knew Kornilyevna Kostoglotov Lev Leonidovich lips listening live looked Ludmila Afanasyevna mean Moscow neck never nurse ofﬁce Oleg once patients Pavel Nikolayevich Podduyev radiotherapy remember Rodichev round Rusanov seemed she‘d shoulders Shulubin Sibgatov sitting smile someone sort Stalin Prize stood stop suddenly talk tell That‘s there’s they‘d they’d thing thought took tram trying tumour turned Ush-Terek Uzbek Vadim voice waiting walked ward wasn‘t wasn’t What’s whole window woman won‘t words X-ray Yefrem you‘re you‘ve young Zoya About the author (201

1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don.

He graduated in physics and mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia.

Russian Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 | PBS NewsHour Russian Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 August 4, 2008 at 6:45 PM EST Loading the player... Acclaimed Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote extensively about the gulag prison system and won the Nobel literature prize for his books on abuses in the Soviet Union, died Sunday at age 89 after a reclusive life fraught with challenges. SUPPORT FOR PBS NEWSHOUR PROVIDED BY MORE VIDEO Conversation: Gulag JEFFREY BROWN: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was first a prisoner in the Soviet Union’s vast Gulag system and then a writer who exposed the horrors of that system to the world. He was born into the first generation following the 1917 Russian revolution and served in the Red Army during World War II. But in 1945, he was arrested by Joseph Stalin’s secret police. His crime: disparaging the Soviet dictator in a letter to a friend.

In 1962, during the short-lived liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn was permitted to publish “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The searing tale of the struggle to survive a winter day’s imprisonment drew international acclaim. Solzhenitsyn would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but renewed scrutiny and then censorship from the soviet state. His most famous work, “The Gulag Archipelago,” part memoir, part history of the prison system in which millions of Russians lost their lives, was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and first published in the West. One of Solzhenitsyn’s sons spoke today of his father’s motivation in writing. STEPAN SOLZHENITSYN, Son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The misery of people here and the lack of freedom under the Soviet regime, their impoverishment after the Soviet regime was always a source of great pain to him. That is why he opposed the Soviet regime. JEFFREY BROWN: Solzhenitsyn was charged with treason in 1974 and forced to leave his country.

He lived in the United States for almost 20 years and continued to write about the Soviet Union, while also criticizing what he saw as the failings of the West. In 1994, he received a hero’s welcome upon return to his native land. It was there that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, outside Moscow, as his wife said he had wished: at home in the summer. He was 89 years old. Author showed power of the word JEFFREY BROWN: And more now from Michael Scammell, a biographer of Solzhenitsyn, translator of many Russian literary works, and author of a forthcoming biography of the writer Arthur Koestler; and Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and author of "Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics." She's the great granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Well, Michael Scammell, can you take us back in time to give us a sense of the power and impact of Solzhenitsyn's works when they first appeared? What did they do?

MICHAEL SCAMMELL, Columbia University: Well, you have to realize that the censorship of the Soviet Union was extremely expert and extremely professional, so that anything that was coming out of official literary circles had been thoroughly vetted beforehand and was generally dead and dull. When Solzhenitsyn managed to publish "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich," it exploded like a bomb. And it had people in Moscow and even in the Soviet provinces saying, "The Soviet censorship is gone. Censorship is dead. We are approaching a new era." Well, of course, that wasn't true. The censorship was softened for a short period, particularly while Nikita Khrushchev was in power, but it was gradually re-enforced. And, unfortunately, one of the reasons that it was, was the success in Solzhenitsyn in reaching not only a very wide public in the Soviet Union, but a worldwide public, as well. JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask Nina Khrushcheva, you were a student, I understand, at the time when he was sent into exile. What do you remember of that time? And how do you assess his impact?

NINA KHRUSHCHEVA, The New School: I was in school. It wasn't even middle school. I remember I was very, very young, but the impact was tremendous. I remember we were walking the school corridors. And everybody was buzzing about the fact that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was ousted out of the country and he was declared a traitor. And I'm sure that everybody felt something more than just what was declared by the authorities. And I remember our teacher was saying he was a horrible man, he betrayed the country, that writers shouldn't behave this way. But since I was brought up in a family where Solzhenitsyn was a hero, where the "One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich" was read, and I'd already read it by then, I'm pretty sure -- I struggled very hard, I guess, to reconcile these two absolute polarities. One is that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and my great-grandfather thought of him as a genius, and then my Soviet school, where I was told that he was a horrible traitor and it was unseeming to a Russian writer to behave this way.

Experience led to new genre JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Scammell, what about the man himself? He grew up in this system. What was there about him, in addition to his experience, of course, in the camps that turned him into this great truth-teller? MICHAEL SCAMMELL: Well, ironically, he was an idealist. As a very young man, he believed in the system. He believed in what he was told by the Soviet regime. He believed in true communism. What he discovered, of course, through his experiences was that true communism was a distant ideal and that the Soviet regime had turned into virtually its opposite, but like many idealists he wasn't prepared just to stop there. He had a burning desire both to expose this hypocrisy and to bear witness to what he himself had experienced, particularly in the labor camps. And this witness took the form of stories like a "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" we've heard about, but also in two magnificent novels, "The First Circle," which described his three years in a special camp just outside Moscow, and "Cancer Ward," in which he chronicled his experiences when he was very close to death with cancer himself.

JEFFREY BROWN: And then Ms. Khrushcheva, in the most famous work, in "The Gulag Archipelago," it is a mix of memoir and of history. He called it an experiment in literary investigation. What did he mean by that? NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, this book, I think, is probably one of the greatest Solzhenitsyn books. And he's going to go into history as the greatest writer of the 20th century of Russia. And what Michael Scammell said just now is very important. I think Solzhenitsyn's incredible talent -- genius, really -- was that he was a great witness. He wrote what he saw. And because he was such a talented witness, I think this book, as an experiment or as a new literary genre, and actually in this Solzhenitsyn wasn't particularly very original, because all great Russian writers always come up with a new genre and then make them into something that the world basically stunned by and in awe of. I mean, Gogol created new genres, Pushkin, and whatnot. And Solzhenitsyn did, indeed, do the same.

But it wasn't a diary. It was just an incredible witness, monolithic account of the horrors of Stalinism. And I think that is probably the greatest monument of Solzhenitsyn's legacy that would be left behind. Independent, abroad and at home JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Scammell, as we said, he came to the U.S. He lived largely as a recluse. I think you met him here. He got most attention, really, for a famous speech at Harvard in which he was critical, very critical of the West. What happened? What was that about? MICHAEL SCAMMELL: Well, I think that his main impulse in making that speech was to inform the West what was needed for Russia, what was needed to rescue Russia from the Soviet Union. And that was his overwhelming concern. When he lived in Vermont, he shut himself away in his study, mainly so that he could write his series of historical novels, called "The Red Wheel," to explain, he hoped, the origins of the Soviet revolution. But his main concern was to find ways to encourage the West, to help the West, and to help the Russian people get rid of that system.

In my view, his remarks on the West, which caused so much controversy, were almost throwaway remarks. Solzhenitsyn was not interested in America for its own sake. He wasn't interested in Western democracy for its own sake. He was interested in what they could do to help Russia get free of the Soviet tyranny. And to that extent, I think it wasn't exactly he was misreported, but he didn't understand the Western media and he didn't understand what would be seized upon and commented upon the most. In this case, it was his rather disparaging remarks about America and about the West in general. JEFFREY BROWN: And just in our last minute, Ms. Khrushcheva, he went back to Russia, he had a hero's welcome, but that didn't last, either. How will he be remembered, do you think, in Russia? NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: It didn't last, either, because Solzhenitsyn was a very interestingly -- he was sort of one-line man, so to speak. I mean, maybe he wasn't interested in the West, per se, but he was very interested in Russia as a unique civilization.

And, therefore, as everybody who thinks that Russia is a unique civilization, the West is by definition an enemy. So I actually think it's fair to say that he was remarkably critical of the West. When he came to Russia and saw what "democratic" -- and I put it in quotes, that's how he believed democratic Russia was under President Yeltsin, he was even more disparaged, because he felt that it was the West's fault in many ways that Russia ended in that particular situation. JEFFREY BROWN: All right. NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: And his message of pushing Russia into greatness really didn't lay well with the Russian public at the time. JEFFREY BROWN: All right. We'll have to leave it there. Nina Khrushcheva and Michael Scammell, thank you both very much. MICHAEL SCAMMELL: You're welcome. ReadLiterature.Com - Russian Literature - Cancer Ward Reviewed by: woo woothedog@eminem.com Date: 9 August 2001 it is definitely one of the best books i've ever read.

it doesn't only deal with life and death, but also with the turbulent political state russia was in, the lives of everyone in the ward who are influenced by the turbulence, and the desires of everyone to gain freedom: freedom from censorship, freedom from cancer, freedom from misery. it's quite obvious to see that solzhenitsyn metaphorized cancer to the lack of freedom the russians had at that time. Reviewed by: D.W. Cymbalisty dcymbalisty@hotmail.com Date: 28 May 2001 "All I want is... to sleep on a camp-bed under the stars... to live just this one summer..." That is the simple sentiment of the patients of the Cancer Ward... expressed by one, but felt by all. Through a study of the diverse lives here assembled, Solzhenitsyn probes with searing exactitude the process of living with cancer, and more specifically, the TREATMENT of cancer patients in Stalinist Russia. He had reason to be acquainted with firsthand knowledge of the topic. In 1954, the 35 year old Solzhenitsyn was himself diagnosed with a rare form of cancer known as seminoma, and was admitted for radiation treatment.

The timeless importance of Cancer Ward lies in its ability for us as readers to consider that aspect of life which we all have in common... its inevitable END! We are all members of a staggering statistic, a 100% mortality rate. How will any of us react to the news that we are less healthy than we had hoped? Well, here we see all the possibilities of response: initial denial, hope, fear, loss of freedom, blind anger, reluctance to accept treatment, despair, eventual resignation... we laugh and we cry with those who laugh and cry. These are REAL fictional people. In fact, the character of Oleg Kostoglotov is very similar to that of Solzhenitsyn himself. Kostoglotov is the forever optimistic realist, and one of the few who ever leave the cancer ward on their own two legs. The biographer D.M. Thomas has noted that Solzhenitsyn seemed to have defeated his cancer by his own "iron determination to live", as does Kostoglotov. Often in the novel, Kostoglotov is pitted against Rusinov, a high-ranking government official who has the most prolonged struggle with accepting his own diagnosis.

One significant verbal exchange between the two is as follows: Rusinov: "We mustn't talk about death! We mustn't even remind anyone of it." Kostoglotov: "If we can't talk about death HERE, where on earth can we?" Especially touching in this story are the meetings of the two teens (a boy and a girl), both of them patients, who strike up a platonic friendship that develops with a depth lacking in many full-blown romances. Beautiful. On September 22, 1967 a session of the Union of Soviet Writers was convened to discuss the degree of censorship to which Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward should be subjected. Some came to revile and berate him, others were there to offer a sort of restrained praise. At that meeting, the author stated: "...I absolutely do not understand why Cancer Ward is being accused of being antihumanitarian. Quite the reverse is true: life conquers death, the past is conquered by the future... In general, the task of the writer cannot be reduced to defense or criticism of one or another form of government.

The tasks of the writer are connected with more general and durable questions, such as the secrets of the human heart and conscience..." After Solzhenitsyn had left to catch his train, it is reported that one of the committee members (Surkov) said: "Well, now we can relax over a few vodkas. I'll tell you what I really think. It may be that when the Soviet empire has gone the way of the Third Reich, Cancer Ward will come to stand even higher than First Circle among his novels. The latter is perhaps just a bit too enclosed, so to speak, within our political system, whereas the former, by dealing with something universal in human experience - cancer, pain, the certainty of dying - will never lose any of its relevance." Ah, the truth-loosening properties of vodka! Write a review and give your opinion and analysis! Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, First Edition - AbeBooks Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, First Edition You Searched For: Results (1 - 30) of 51 1 Published by Dell Publishing, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A.

(1973) Used S Mass Market Paperback First Edition Quantity Available: 1 ISBN 10: 0553047531 ISBN 13: 9780553047530 Used First Edition Published by Dial Press (1968) Used First Edition ISBN 10: 0140032290 ISBN 13: 9780140032291 Used Colour Paperback First Edition Quantity Available: 1 Published by Penguin Books, Middlesex (1971) Used Mass Market Paperback First Edition Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1971. Mass Market Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good (AVERAGE). No Jacket. Cover Design By Gary Blake (illustrator). Reprint. FEEL FREE TO E-MAIL FOR PHOTOGRAPHS AND FURTHER DETAILS. FROM A DEALER WHO TELLS YOU WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEIR TELEPHONE AND ADDRESS CONTACT DETAILS ARE! Size: Mass Market Paperback. Not Signed or Inscribed. Mass Market Paperback.

Bookseller Inventory # 999000411 Published by New York, The Dial Press, 1968. (1968) Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 0140032290 ISBN 13: 9780140032291 Used Colour Paperback First Edition Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin, Harmondsworth , Middlesex ., 1974. Colour Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good (AVERAGE). No Jacket. Not Illustrated (illustrator). Reprint. Browned paper edges.please e-mail for further details. Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾". Not Signed or Inscribed. PAPERBACK. Bookseller Inventory # 013283 Published by Bodley Head, Oxford (1968) Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Bodley Head, Oxford, 1968. Blue Cloth. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. First Edition. Clean and bright with owner's name and date on front endpaper.

Dustjacket is not clipped but is rubbed at some edges. 338 pages. Size: 5" x 7.5". hardback. Bookseller Inventory # 042785 Published by The Dial Press, New York (1968) Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: The Dial Press, New York, 1968. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. First Edition. No markings. Stated first printing. Dust jacket has small tears to the edges, small pieces missing from the edges, in a protective cover, $8.50 on the front flap. Bookseller Inventory # 025578 Published by New York, NY USA: The Dial Press Inc. (1968) Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: New York, NY USA: The Dial Press Inc., 1968. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Hard Cover. First edition. No dust jacket. Very lightly rubbed at corners and spine ends. Spine flattened. Pages clear and bright. Binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # M3560 ISBN 10: 0370005872 ISBN 13: 9780370005874 Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: William Clowes and Sons Limited, UK, 1969. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. 279 Pages. Foredges of the page are slightly marked. When part 1 of Cancer Ward was published last autumn, its importance was immediately recognised and it became a best-seller. With the publication of part 2 the full scope and stature of the novel become clear. The action begins five weeks after the end of part 1. Book Description: One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the 'cancerous' Soviet police state. Withdrawn from publication in Russia in 1964, it became, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that awoke the conscience of the world.

As Robert Service wrote of its appeal in the Independent, 'In waging his struggle against Soviet communism, Solzhenitsyn the novelist preferred the rapier to the cudgel'.: Review: "Solzhenitsyn is a man of genius.it is a privilege to be Solzhenitsyn's contemporary" (Observer): "There has been no such analysis of the corrupting power of the police state in Soviet literature" (Listener): "He is one of the towering figures of the age, as writer, as moralist, as hero" (Edward Cranshaw) : Book Description: 'Without a doubt the greatest Russian novelist' Sunday Times 288 pages. Quantity Available: 1. Category: Fiction; ISBN: 0370005872. ISBN/EAN: 9780370005874. Inventory No: V295-1245. Bookseller Inventory # V295-1245 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: The Dial Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1968. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good.

1st Edition. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. First Printing stated, no writing, marks, underlining, or bookplates. No remainder marks. Spine is tight and crisp. Boards are flat and true and the corners are square. Dust jacket is not price-clipped in good condition only with chips, scrapes and faded spine. This collectible, " VERY GOOD" condition first edition/first printing copy is protected with a polyester archival dust jacket cover. Still an attractive, collectible reading copy. Bookseller Inventory # 002740 A Diseased Body Politic A Diseased Body Politic By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Translated by Rebecca Frank from the Russian. he union of a great artist and a great theme constitutes, as Kierkegaard observed, "the fortunate in the historical process, the divine conjunction of its forces, the high tide of historic time." Thus the union of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the theme of the concentration camp has produced one of the masterworks of 20th-century fiction.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." "One Day," and "The First Circle" as well, achieve what Camus deemed impossible: they compel the human imagination to participate in the agony and murder of millions that have been the distinguishing feature of our age. Such a task could only have been accomplished by literature, performing here what may be, after the historical cataclysm of Stalinism and Nazism, its highest cathartic function. The latest Solzhenitsyn novel to appear in America, "The Cancer Ward," engages another theme which, like prison, the author has witnessed and endured. Once again he guides us into the enclosed world of the condemned and, at his relentless touch, forces us into an awareness of man in extremis. But there is a difference between the theme of the concentration camp and the theme of the cancer ward which makes the first cry out for a Solzhenitsyn, and the second pass him by. It is obvious enough: the camp is man-made, gratuitous and absolutely modern. Disease is God-given, unavoidable, and eternal. "Where can I read about us?" asks one of Solzhenitsyn's characters, an ex-prisoner who despises contemporary literature.

"Will it only be a hundred years from now?" With "One Day," published in Russia in 1962, Solzhenitsyn offered millions of Russians the chance at last to read about themselves, in the story of the innocent carpenter, Ivan Denisovich, who is subjected to the most painful and degrading experience imaginable, without knowing. In "The First Circle," which has been banned in Russia, Solzhenitsyn explored the anatomy of Stalinism, in exhaustive detail, showing how it destroys human relations, warps the mind and deforms the spirit. Clearly Solzhenitsyn believes in the power of literature to exorcise Stalinism. Vain as this hope may be, it has inextricably bound a great writer to his great, and perhaps his only subject. Solzhenitsyn has applied the same method to the subject of "Cancer Ward." Here he examines, with clinical precision, the nature of the physical disease and the process whereby the patient, like the prisoner--"stripped of his outer bark and ready to be planed"--is revealed to himself, and sometimes transformed by the confrontation with death.

A great theme, no doubt, but familiar; it does not meet the same terrible, imperative need to know as did Solzhenitsyn's earlier novels. Tolstoy has shown us, perhaps once and for all, how a man may be reduced to his essence by disease in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," which is evidently the model for "Cancer Ward." As subject and symbol in modern fiction, disease requires perhaps a more sophisticated and ambiguous writer than Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn insists that his novel is simply about cancer. At a meeting of the Secretariat of the Union of Writers on Sept. 22, 1967, four months before Konstantin Fedin, the head of the Union, banned "The Cancer Ward," Solzhenitsyn replied to his critics who had accused him of writing a symbolic novel. "There are too many medical details for it to be a symbol," he said. "I have given my novel to important cancer specialists asking their opinion. They replied that from the medical point of view it is unchalleangeable and up-to-date.

It is about cancer, cancer as such, not as it is written about in literature devised to entertain people, but as it is experienced every day by the sick." Solzhenitsyn must, of course, be taken seriously here. As a medical novel, "The Cancer Ward" offers a fair and quite interesting picture of medicine as practiced in a Central Asian city in 1955. The author himself was cast up in Tashkent, sick with cancer, at about the same period, after spending eight years in prisons and camps. Still in exile--he was not "rehabilitated" until 1957-- he entered a hospital where his cancer, never clearly diagnosed as malignant, was arrested. As Solzhenitsyn is the ultimate realist writer, whose life story is indistinguishable from his fiction, it can be assumed that the cancer ward he describes is much as he observed it. In spite of Solzhenitsyn's clinical preoccupations, the reader must strain hard to read this novel as a book about cancer.

What are we to make of this question posed by the author: "A man sprouts a tumor and dies--how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?" Again and again Solzhenitsyn is compelled to return, perhaps despite himself, to his great theme. Who are his cancer-ridden patients? Exiles, an ex-prisoner, a concentration-camp guard, and a secret- police bureaucrat whose denunciations have sent dozens of people to prison. As "One Day" stands for the agony of all Russia under Stalin, so "The Cancer Ward" irresistibly conveys an image of the immediate post-Stalin period when both victims and executioners were confined, all equally mutilated, in the cancer ward of the nation. How fatal this mutilation may be is suggested in the conversation between ex-prisoner Kostoglotov and Shulubin, who is going to his death on the operating table. Here Shulubin raises the question which lies at the center of all Solzhenitsyn's work: the moral responsibility of countless Russians for the imprisonment of millions of innocent people. Shulubin envies Kostoglotov for having been in a camp.

"At least you lied less, do you understand. At least you changed less. . . You were jailed. But we were forced to stand and applaud the sentences that had been pronounced. Not just to applaud, but to demand execution, to demand it." Shulubin is enraged by the notion that anyone wholly believed in Stalinism. "Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turned out to be saboteurs--and they believed it? . . .Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades--and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people--and they believed it?. . .Surely the whole nation can't consist of fools. . .When history pauses to ask about each of us: Who was he? the only answer will be one of the alternatives that Pushkin offered in his verse. In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he." Even as the immense concentration camp system begins to be liquidated after Stalin's death, and mass terror subsides, new fears possess the Soviet citizen in the cancer ward.

For the secret- police bureaucrat, it is fear of retribution by the innocent men he has denounced, some of whom are now returning from camps. For the ex-prisoner, the new fear is of freedom itself. In a splendid passage at the end of the novel, Oleg Kostoglotov, released from the cancer ward, and looking forward to the end of the "eternal exile" to which he had been condemned, visits the Tashkent zoo during his first hours of liberty: "The monkeys, all looking as if they had close prison haircuts, sad, occupied with primitive joys and sorrows on their board bunks, reminded him so strongly of his former acquaintances that he almost recognized some of them--men still serving their terms somewhere. . . .The most profound thing about the confinement of these beasts was that Oleg, taking their side, could not have released them, even if he'd had the power, to break open their cages, because they had lost, together with their homelands, the idea of real freedom.

The result of their sudden liberation could only be more terrible." In such passages, Solzhenitsyn wholly meets the expectations aroused by his two earlier novels, and by his superb story "Matreyona's Home." But some of the faults that began to be apparent in "The First Circle"--a lack of measure, and, sometimes, of control over the material and a penchant for simplistic moralizing--are accentuated in "The Cancer Ward." Both "The Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" badly need cutting. Solzhenitsyn rewrote "One Day" three times until he achieved the supreme spareness which has been rivaled in modern fiction only by Babel and Camus. This reviewer finished "The Cancer Ward" with mixed and turbulent feelings. On the one hand I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to read a work that, in spite of its weaknesses, towers about the novels that glut our marketplace. On the other, I am sickened by the knowledge that it cannot be read in Russia and that the publication of this book, like that of "The First Circle," ignores the author's own urgently expressed prohibition.

Solzhenitsyn has several times spoken of the "danger" of the appearance of his banned books abroad, and charged that the Soviet secret police has circulated them in order to incriminate him. In his most recent statement about "The Cancer Ward" Solzhenitsyn declared last April 21 that no foreign publishers had obtained the manuscript, or authorization to publish it, from him. He expressed concern that the translations would be spoiled because of haste in the competitive scramble to publish his book. "But beyond money," he said, "there is literature." It should be noted, however, in connection with this first publication in America by the Dial Press, that several editions of the novel have already appeared in Europe; it may be argued that one more edition will not substantially increase the danger to Solzhenitsyn, especially when, as is the case here, no claim is made to authorization." Be that as it may, Solzhenitsyn's apprehensions about the translations of the novel have been, in this instance, unfounded. Rebecca Frank's rendering is first-rate, nearly always imaginatively responsive to the author's use of out-of-the-way words, and to his abrupt shifts of tone and diction.

Miss Blake is the editor of four collections of Soviet literature in translation, including "Half-way to the Moon: New Writing from Russia." Russia's literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime | Books | The Guardian Russia's literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in central Siberia, Russia, 1994 Photograph: Rex Features Michael Scammell Monday 4 August 2008 05.51 EDT First published on Monday 4 August 2008 05.51 EDT Share on Messenger Close Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. He was a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his long-suffering people and single-handedly challenging the autocratic government of one of the world's two superpowers.

Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle that secured for him the role of conscience of the nation. Later, he showed unmatched physical and moral courage in writing and publishing his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, a torrential narrative mixing history, politics, autobiography, documentary, corrosive personal comment and philosophical speculation into one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature. Not least of Solzhenitsyn's achievements was his resurrection of the 19th-century Russian ideal of the writer as secular prophet. A prescient reader once wrote to him: "No matter how things are going, we have always felt better when we have a Turgenev, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov. It is not enough for us for a writer to be a good writer, even a great writer.

He has to be someone we can love." The Mexican writer Octavio Paz attributed Solzhenitsyn's power to his continuation of an even more ancient tradition, that of Orthodox Christianity, which had taught him to endure sacrifice and risk even death to bear witness: "In a century of false testimonies, a writer becomes the witness to man." Born in Kislovodsk in southern Russia , between the Black and Caspian seas, Solzhenitsyn was almost the same age as the Russian Revolution. Despite some hard years as the sole child of a sick churchgoing mother (his father had died before his birth), he grew up a loyal communist and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime. As a student at Rostov University, he edited the Komsomol — communist youth movement — newspaper with conspicuous success, and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement. Although his degree was in mathematics and physics, he also studied on his own for a diploma in literature from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, began to write short stories, and drafted the plan for an immense "Tolstoyan" novel intended to celebrate the October Revolution of 1917.

But it was his devotion to revolutionary purity that was to prove his undoing. As an artillery captain during the second world war, he wrote letters to a friend expressing barely disguised hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule and hoping for a return to socialist principles when the war was over. These letters were intercepted by Smersh, the Soviet counter-espionage service, and shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced in July 1945 to eight years in the labour camps and three years' administrative exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". The shock of this arrest and the subsequent privations he endured in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow were to lead to some of the finest pages in The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1974-76)???: "Of all the cells you've been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you will remember it with an emotion that can only be compared to memories of your first love.

And those people with whom you shared the floor and air of that stone cubicle during the days when you rethought your entire life will later be recalled by you as members of your own family." During his first few months in the camps, Solzhenitsyn almost died from starvation and overwork. He was saved by his unexpected transfer to a sharashka, a scientific institute devoted to the study of decoding techniques and staffed entirely by scientifically trained prisoners while being supervised and run by the MVD (the ministry of internal affairs). Here he was thrown into the company of a group of highly educated and intelligent fellow prisoners, who broadened his intellectual horizons and forced him to re-examine his earlier beliefs. Two friends in particular, Lev Kopelev and Dmitri Panin, involved him in long philosophical and political debates, while the painter Sergei Ivashov-Musatov opened Solzhenitsyn's eyes to the possibility of combining realism with symbolism in art.

These experiences were to form the core of the finest of Solzhenitsyn's longer novels, The First Circle (1969), whose title referred to Dante's circles of hell: the first circle was reserved for "the wise men of antiquity," pagans but not sinners of commission. A subplot in that novel reflected Solzhenitsyn's painful personal life at this time. After his graduation from Rostov University in 1940 he had married a fellow student, Natalia Reshetovskaya, who had moved to Moscow following his transfer to the sharashka (which was in Marfino, just outside the capital), and was working for her doctorate in chemistry. Her laboratory was classified, and she told Solzhenitsyn on one of her rare permitted visits that she might have to divorce him in order to keep her position, and they were indeed divorced in 1952. In 1950, after three years at the sharashka Solzhenitsyn was transferred to a special camp at Ekibastuz in northern Kazakhstan, where he worked for three more years, first as a bricklayer, and then as a brigade leader in the machine shop.

The grinding hard labour, the extremes of heat and cold, the brutality of the guards, and the corruption of the camp administration were later evoked with great brilliance in his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). The suffering provoked a bloody riot (not mentioned in Ivan Denisovich but fully described in The Gulag Archipelago), which was followed by a hunger strike. A commission of inquiry was appointed, and Solzhenitsyn, as a brigade leader, urged caution on his fellow strikers and supported compromise. But the prisoners were cynically deceived by the commission, and Solzhenitsyn learned the bitter lesson that compromise with the authorities was impossible. It was while still in the camps that Solzhenitsyn had his first brush with cancer. He was rushed to the infirmary in great pain and operated on for cancer of the groin. The treatment was unsuccessful, and a few months later in 1954, in exile in southern Kazakhstan, he dragged himself to a cancer clinic in Tashkent for further treatment. "That autumn I learned from my own experience that a man can cross the threshold of death while occupying a body that is still not dead.

Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests things, but psychologically you have completed all your preparations for death and lived through death itself … Although you have never regarded yourself as a Christian — sometimes, indeed, the opposite — now you suddenly notice that you have already forgiven everyone who has insulted you." Solzhenitsyn's ordeal during these months became the substance of Cancer Ward (1968). They also provoked a spiritual crisis and a return to the Christian faith of his mother. He came to the conclusion that religion was superior to ideology, because it struggled with "the evil inside man", whereas revolutions destroyed the contingent carriers of evil, but embraced "the evil itself", and even magnified it. He also concluded that "the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties — it runs through the heart of each and every one of us". Solzhenitsyn's release from exile and rise to world fame is inextricably linked with the name and policies of Nikita Khrushchev, who encouraged the thaw after Stalin's death in 1953 and inaugurated a wide-ranging policy of de-Stalinisation.

Returning from exile in 1956 to Russia a free man, Solzhenitsyn was reunited with Natalia, who had remarried. She left her second husband for Solzhenitsyn again — they were married again in 1957. He settled down as a schoolteacher in Ryazan, a medium-sized town about 100 miles south-east of Moscow. While in exile in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn had laboured to revise the numerous works he had composed in the camps. They included a long narrative poem of thousands of lines ("twice the length of Eugene Onegin"), lyric poetry, plays in verse and in prose, and the draft of the novel that was to become The First Circle. His camp experiences had taught him the Joycean virtues of "silence, exile, and cunning," and for several years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day.

But he changed his mind after the party's 22nd congress in October 1961, when Khrushchev vowed to erect a monument to the victims of Stalinism, and Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the influential magazine, Novy Mir, called on writers to tell the truth about "the era of the personality cult". Solzhenitsyn had just completed a short novel about a day in the life of a typical prisoner, which was less extreme in its political opinions than his early poems and plays. He arranged for it to be forwarded anonymously to Tvardovsky, setting in motion a chain of events that was to be compared to the discovery of Dostoevsky by the poet and publisher Nikolai Nekrasov a hundred years earlier. Tvardovsky stayed up all night reading the manuscript, then deluged friends and colleagues with the news that "a great writer has been born". Tvardovsky was obliged to go all the way up the chain of command to Khrushchev himself to get the novel published. It is said that Khrushchev had to bully his politburo colleagues into reading it.

When they declined to make a decision, Khrushchev allegedly said: "There's a Russian proverb that says silence is consent." One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation when it appeared in the November 1961 issue of the literary magazine Novy Mir. So daring were its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps that many Russians concluded that the censorship had suddenly been abolished. The elder statesman of Russian literature, Korney Chukovsky, called the book "a literary miracle", the famous poet Anna Akhmatova described Solzhenitsyn as "a bearer of light", and said his story should be read by "every one of the 200 million citizens of the Soviet Union". The responses of the reading public were even more overwhelming: "I kiss your golden hands", "thank you for your truthfulness", "let me bow to the ground before you", "we love you, we believe you, we thank you." "Thank you, dear friend, comrade and brother. Reading your story I remembered the frosts and blizzards, the insults and humiliations. I wept as I read.

Keep well, dear friend." There had been nothing like it in the entire history of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn had achieved the miracle of pleasing his country's leaders, its critically minded intelligentsia, and the broad mass of his readers. Moreover, his impact on foreign readers was almost as strong: within weeks his name was known all over the world. In quick succession he published three more stories in Novy Mir, the most memorable being the much anthologised Matryona's Place (1963), about a saintly peasant woman, with its celebrated conclusion: "None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand. Nor our whole land." Solzhenitsyn's fall from official grace was almost as precipitous as his rise. In 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power, and Solzhenitsyn narrowly failed to win the Lenin prize for literature.

A year later, Leonid Brezhnev began his drive against the intellectuals, signalled by the arrest of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for publishing their works clandestinely in the west, and the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle from a friend's apartment, together with copies of some of his early poems and plays. By now Solzhenitsyn was half-way through Cancer Ward, but although part one was slated for publication by Novy Mir, it was blocked by the authorities. Solzhenitsyn was convinced that his arrest was imminent, and went to ground for several weeks, but although Sinyavsky and Daniel were eventually sentenced to labour camp terms at a show trial in Moscow, he remained unscathed, and came to the conclusion that the authorities were afraid of him (a calculation that government documents were later to prove correct). From 1966 to 1968, he and Tvardovsky fought doggedly to get either The First Circle or Cancer Ward (now in two parts) into print, and to have one or the other of his plays staged, but the KGB, under the leadership of Yuri Andropov, was just as determined to stop him.

Having identified him as the author of an incendiary early play, Victory Celebrations, with some bitter anti-Soviet comments in it, the KGB circulated copies to members of the Writers' Union, and advocated his expulsion. Solzhenitsyn fought back with a celebrated open letter to the Writers' Union congress in March 1967, citing the long line of distinguished Russian writers suppressed or killed by the Soviet government and calling for a complete end to censorship: "A survival of the Middle Ages, censorship has managed, Methuselah-like to drag out its existence almost to the 21st century. Perishable, it attempts to arrogate to itself the prerogative of imperishable time, of separating good books from bad." Solzhenitsyn also appealed to the union to support his struggle to have his own works published — an appeal that fell on deaf ears. The increasing repression of religious and nationalist dissent by the Brezhnev administration had led to the explosive growth of a dissident movement, which exerted leverage by appeals to the west for support.

Solzhenitsyn was both a part of the movement and the object of several of its appeals, and he capitalised on his international reputation by sending copies of his unpublished novels abroad. In 1968 part one of Cancer Ward was published in English by the Bodley Head (followed by translations in other languages), and a year later, Harper & Row brought out The First Circle. Both novels were old-fashioned in their panoramic reach, their huge cast of characters and realistic manner, but hugely innovative in their subject matter: the submerged and hitherto (except for Solzhenitsyn's own early novel) undescribed world of the labour camps. Solzhenitsyn was acknowledged as a "truth-teller" and a witness to the cruelties of Stalinism of unusual power and eloquence. His fame grew exponentially. He was hailed as a fearless chronicler of evil and as the greatest Russian writer of his time. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 inaugurated a new push against dissidents, and the following year, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union.

But in 1970 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and this greatly strengthened his position vis-a-vis the government. Other prominent dissidents tried to make common cause with him, but although he sympathised with their goals, Solzhenitsyn stayed aloof and preferred to pursue his own path. The sole exception was Academician Sakharov, whose Memorandum on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom had greatly impressed him, and with whom he had discussed issuing a joint statement on the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The two men met several times, but Sakharov, the typical "westerniser", with a great admiration for western society and democratic norms, soon found himself at odds with the "Slavophile" Solzhenitsyn, who had acquired a deep regard for the traditions of the Orthodox church and a growing conviction that Russia should follow a separate path from the west. Nevertheless, the two did act in concert to block some aspects of the Brezhnev-Nixon policy of détente, and were instrumental in getting the US Senate to include a human rights plank in the agreement. Solzhenitsyn's increasingly conservative and patriotic views were now beginning to alienate him from liberal opinion in the Soviet Union.

In his historical novel, August 1914, published in the west in 1971, he painted a rosy picture of pre-revolutionary Russia, and in three essays for a samizdat collection inspired and masterminded by him, From Under the Rubble, he praised Russia's Orthodox church and authoritarian political tradition, developed the idea that nations, as well as individuals, should practise the Christian virtues of repentance and self-abnegation, and excoriated the Russian intelligentsia for selling out to Soviet power in exchange for material privileges. In his 1973 political manifesto, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (written partly in response to Sakharov's Memorandum), he spelled out his views in even greater detail, disclosing a vision that was patriarchal and bucolic, and impelled by an intense aversion to modernity in all its forms. Publication of the Letter (which Solzhenitsyn had sent personally to Brezhnev, without response) was delayed by another major development.

The KGB had tracked down and confiscated a copy of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's immense camp history that he had written in the deepest secret and concealed for years from all but close intimates. Copies were already in the west, and when Solzhenitsyn learned of the KGB's coup, he displayed great personal courage in ordering its immediate publication. The appearance of volume one in January 1974 was a bombshell: the book went far beyond anything Solzhenitsyn had published before in revealing the abuses of the regime even as far back as the early twenties, and placed, in the words of one commentator, "a burning question mark over 50 years of Soviet power". Another wrote that "the time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag". The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the west provoked the politburo to decree his immediate deportation, and after a sensational arrival by plane in West Germany in 1974, he settled in Zurich for two years.

There he was joined by his second wife, Natalia Svetlova (whom had married in 1973, having divorced Reshetovskaya the previous year), and their three young sons, Yermolai, Ignat and Stepan. During this time he travelled widely, made speeches denouncing the Soviet regime, and published a fascinating memoir, The Oak and the Calf (1975), in which he revealed many new details about his battle with the Soviet authorities. Meanwhile volumes two and three of The Gulag Archipelago appeared to less public acclaim than volume one, but confirmed the uniqueness and immensity of that vast enterprise. In 1976 Solzhenitsyn moved to Vermont, and after making a badly received speech at Harvard about the west's derelictions in its dealings with the Soviet Union swore himself to public silence while working on a series of historical novels that continued the story of August 1914 (1971) under the collective title of The Red Wheel.

The original plan had called for up to 20 novels, but the sheer length of the next two novels in the series, October 1916 and March 1917 (each consisting of two volumes, published in 1985 and 1998), showed that this would be physically impossible. Solzhenitsyn therefore concluded the cycle with April 1917 (1991), possibly influenced by the fact that the historical novels were being met with neither critical nor popular success. The consensus held them to be too densely packed with historical data and turgid commentary, and too short on artistic invention to be of great interest to readers. Since the appearance of August 1914, only one other volume, November 1916, has been translated into English so far, although others are scheduled for the future. From the moment of his deportation Solzhenitsyn averred that he would return to Russia, and he was right.

Having observed Gorbachev's perestroika with great scepticism from the vantage point of Vermont, and having remained aloof for a further three years after Yeltsin dismantled communism, he made a triumphal return in May 1994, travelling from Vladivostok to Moscow by train. He had set out his political views on Russia's future in two long essays, Rebuilding Russia and How Shall We Organise Russia, and fully expected to be consulted by the country's political elite, but it did not happen. He was welcomed with genuine warmth and gratitude, but the politicians (until Putin's much-publicised personal visit several years later) kept their distance, and his stint as host of a short-lived television show quickly ended. Once more Solzhenitsyn retired from public view, settling in a comfortable villa on the outskirts of Moscow. But despite his advancing years, he kept up a punishing work schedule and was rarely out of the news.

After publishing numerous fragments left over from his work on The Red Wheel, he released a second volume of his memoirs, Invisible Allies (1995), a sequel to The Oak and the Calf, describing his experiences in the west, and then a monumental history of the Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together (2001-02). Volume one had provoked a bitter controversy, with many accusing Solzhenitsyn of a barely concealed anti-Semitism — a charge that had dogged him since the appearance of August 1914 — but others defended his courage in tackling such a controversial topic, finding it typical of Sozhenitsyn's genius for raising and examining "forbidden" subjects. Solzhenitsyn was essentially an old-fashioned artist working within the conventions of the 19th century novel, but the pressure of his extreme subject matter, the passion and discipline he brought to his craft, and the exigencies of the times helped him to stretch the boundaries of Russian realism and find new expressive possibilities for it. He was a truth-teller and moralist of rare force, whose dedication to the ideals of freedom and justice took him beyond literature into the realms of history, philosophy, religion, politics and international affairs.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona's Home, The First Circle and Cancer Ward have already entered the pantheon of Russian literature. The Oak and the Calf is one of the finest memoirs ever produced by a Russian writer, and The Gulag Archipelago is a unique epic, whose full literary and historical merit remains to be weighed. Solzhenitsyn will be remembered in the short term as the bard of the Gulag, a fearless tribune who exercised a crucial liberating influence at a decisive moment in Soviet history, but in the context of the ages, his works will be read so long as readers thirst for the truth about life on this planet. He is survived by Natalia Svetlova and their sons. · Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, born December 11 1918; died August 3 2008 · This article was amended on Thursday August 7 2008. The above obituary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that after the mid-1960s his works were never republished while the Soviet regime remained in power.

In fact in the perestroika period several were republished, including The Gulag Archipelago. This has been corrected.

Question: Which Russian writer wrote Cancer Ward?
Answer: Alexander Solzhenitsyn